‘O, mother, mother, what have you done?’ September 5, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Atomies of love, Becoming....Tags: Coriolanus, emotional health, mothers, Peter Pan, Princess Diana, self harm, shakespeare
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It’s not only the anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing and the sprite Peter Pan who blamed mothers for universal ills. In an emotional crescendo, Shakespeare’s hero Coriolanus howls ‘O mother, mother what have you done?’
Coriolanus’ fall from hero to exile is caused by a revengeful narcissism, which makes him seem arrogant rather than vulnerable when – victorious in battle – he refuses to expose his wounds to the marketplace as custom demands. (You can find descriptions of his wounds in Plutarch’s Lives but not an account of his relationship with his suffocating mother.) Shakespeare was not keen on mothers: often they are most present by their absence. He doesn’t manage ‘a good enough one’, let alone a loving mother, anywhere. I’ve just thought of Queen Constance in King John, but she must be the exception. And, there’s Hermione but she’s too vulnerable. When I think about Coriolanus’ inability to expose his wounds it provokes other thoughts in me, which cluster around differences between concrete acts of self-harm and psychic equivalents. It’s common for some adolescents who self harm to bear their cuttings like jewelry, at least when among their peers. I’ve just been reading some Chaucer with Dan and in the commentary I was much intrigued to read that in the early Medieval period it was commonly regarded that body cutting was a means of enhancing spiritual energy.
If one is positioned to talk to adolescents about their self harm they will often explain that seeing their blood run free gives them a sense of being alive, (often in contrast to feeling emotionally dead) and that allows them to feel empowered. My daughter Tanya is a psychotherapist with extensive experience in working with self harmers. I was once listening to her give a public lecture and at the end one of the mums asked her what was her most frequent piece of advice. Quickly, she replied, ‘Don’t interfere, don’t over-react and make sure you have lashings of lint, antiseptic and plaster visible in an accessible drawer.’ I’ve had little professional experience of physical acts of self-harm although it is not a phenomenon limited to adolescents and more often it’s the boys who carry it on into manhood.
I will never forget Princess Diana disclosing – if not revealing – her self harmed thighs on Panorama. In fact she was probably doing it for her mother who left Diana comforting her small brother when she disappeared from their lives without warning. Diana probably went on invisibly crying inside for her mother all her life. Diana’s mother filed for the custody of her children but then her own mother, Lady Fermoy testified against her and in favour of her husband and an enforced reign of terror began. Diana was crying because she was abandoned and didn’t know why and Coriolanus was crying because he was impinged on and both were traumatized forever.
One of the saddest things I’ve read was when I was editing a book on Diana’s death, and I read her will online in which her last will and testament reinvests her mother’s authority: ‘Should any child of mine be under age at the date of the death of the survivor of myself and my husband, I appoint my mother and my brother Earl Spencer to be the guardians of that child and I express the wish that should I predecease my husband he will consult my mother with regard to the upbringing …of our children’.
Flesh wounds can heal in a way that psychic wounds although invisible, often do not. They have the capacity to eat their way into the brain, through people’s lives and erode their self-esteem. It’s true that some words are immortal and it’s usually the insulting ones. There should be a recipe book for cooking, bottling and pickling the elusive essences of self-esteem. Absent mothers, wronged mothers, impinging mothers, blind mothers, vain mothers all suffocate their young. It’s a more sophisticated form of what other animals sometimes do. But, who doesn’t long for the mother of their dreams, and maybe a few even have them. After all even Peter Pan never stopped wanting one.
John Haynes’ photograph of the week: ‘Bacchante couchee’ August 28, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Atomies of love, Becoming..., Thinking skywards.add a comment
Copyright John Haynes 2008: Auguste Clesinger, ’Bacchante couchee’ 1848.
What animal would you most like to be? August 8, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Atomies of love, dogs.Tags: envy, parenting, Thandie Newton
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‘My mutt Maggie because she gets to spoon my eldest daughter ‘Ripley’ every night.’ Thandie Newton, in My London, last night.
‘Come away, oh human child?/To the waters and the wild/With a faery hand in hand,/For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.’ Yeats
Alex, our son, sometime, in the eighties.
I thought I’d never have anything to blog again but Thandie Newton’s answer in the Evening Standard coalesced my inchoate thoughts. (People keep asking how I have the time to blog; slowly the answer has come. It’s my new hobby. Somehow, writing into the ether and not knowing who might find it, is the incentive.) It has become addictive. Not the writing but the intriguing processes of inner observation as to what it will be, outside of myself, that provokes me into writing again when I feel empty.
Newton’s answer inspires more thoughts, which include that two of my ‘luxuries’ have become the foundations of this blog. My first luxury is to read the dreadful Evening Standard Friday Magazine because it evokes such envy in me through its miasma of ‘easy’ success, beauty, money and the good life. I can allow myself to envy youth without doing any harm. ENVY by Giotto ( Envy emitteth some malign and poisonous spirit which taketh hold of the life of another…For he that cannot possibly mend his own case will do what he can to impair another’s.’ The essays or counsels, civil and moral, of Francis Bacon.)
But, I genuinely love the cosmology of souls and their tastes that are served up onto its regular platter My London.
Taking minicabs, and it’s minicab drivers – with their amazing salad bowl ethnicity – rather than black cabs – that delight me, is my second luxury. I don’t care how rickety the cab is (ideally, I should like one of those Charing Cross rickshaws to pick me up from work). I hop in and surrender to what is often appalling driving without a murmur, which is not like me. I’m a dreadful back seat driver, due to some hefty car accidents in which, whoever was driving our car, was not the offender. I never put on the seat belt in a cab, or grit my teeth at some of the narrow red-light escapes, I just let it all be, which is my third luxury.
I almost never take the tube, the thought of being suspended with strangers without oxygen in a tunnel petrifies me; the rare exception is when I’m accompanied by a friend that I am willing to die with, if not for. When I’m avoiding luxury, I’m keen on buses and it’s then, when I’m on the 189 – which goes in a straight line from Baker Street to the Abbey Road – I sometimes witness affecting human interactions.
I identify with Newton’s ‘spooning Mutt’ because Lucy also spoons every night, except she’s as hot as I am on a crowded tube.
What ‘gets me’ about Newton’s choice is that it expresses her love for her child, through her nostalgic observation that it’s become more appropriate for Mutt Maggie to spoon than mother. (That is, if you are OK with letting dogs into beds.) Newton tells me what I already know: there are some mothers, though it’s not true of all, whose lives are transformed by their intense love for their children, in unimaginable ways which continue evolving forever. (Some fathers, too.)
There is a debate to be had, which is as fascinating to me as the medieval courtly debate about which is the more inspiring role: to love or to be loved, and the more commonplace nurture/nature debate, which is: Is it possible to be as devoted a partner as a parent, or does one inevitably dominate? In a cliché, come seven o’clock, is it the canapés or the children?
Back to the 189. It’s become a bus route that as I pass the turning for Bell Street market I expect the odd tethered goat to clamber on, or a basketful of cockerel. Last week an elderly and artisanal-looking couple clambered. I think they were both close to eighty, which when multiplied is 160 years of life. The man, who had once been tall, must have fallen because his chin was strapped in plaster and if one looked closely, which I do, there was a leaking scintilla of ruby blood. His clothes were as worn as his face but what made him precious was his energy. His wife, as fat as he was lean, was wearing trainers and it was too easy to imagine that walking had become a chore. She was exhausted and I started to imagine her arriving home and sinking into her favourite chair, with a sigh. Perhaps, forever.
There was nothing particular about them except for the man’s energy and his brow, beaker full of intelligence, which still carried intimations of an inner child. His hair was lank-stranded and his watery eyes, although faded, were blazed with ancestral pride. He was carrying a child. His wife turned to me and started to complain about how hot the buses had become, except I thought that it was she who was hot and very tired. Soon, she found another seat at the front of the bus and left her husband to entertain their grandchild. A divine boy, maybe eighteen months, but he was, for certain, beautiful and with perhaps an oriental slant to his ivory skin and shiny beetle-glee eyes.
He was learning to talk and his long, unintelligible, sentences of cadent sound bedazzled his grandfather. (And me.) Together, along with whoops of dancing joy and recognition, they commented on everything that took their eye. The man held his grandson aloft as if he was a diadem. No, not as if, he was his diadem of joy.
Sometimes, the child’s delight at a passing dog, or the onset of rain was so effervescent that he bellowed down the bus to his grandmother for her confirmation, but she was slumped and still too exhausted to reply.
I thought, ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick, unless/Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing/For every tatter in its mortal dress.’ Yeats.
Snapshot of a Daughter – spooned – in 1973
Lucy the vizsla … and other things. July 29, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Atomies of love, dogs.Tags: dogs, Piero di Cosimo, tutelary spirits, vets, visla
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Lucy, the Vizsla and Piero di Cosimo’s dogs
Lucy is my/our Hungarian Vizsla dog and she provokes a daily despair in me to think that when people see her circling the park they assume she is a puppy. She is almost eight. I celebrate each day of Lucy’s life.
Our family has always loved Vizslas for their extravagant and rust-beechen colouring; their amber-gem eyes. They have claws and noses to match, and wild, willful and opinionated but sensitive natures. They are living and mortal works of great art. They remind me of, and rival, Piero di Cosmo’s painting of his nameless red dog. Vasari reported that Piero ‘lived more like a beast than a man.’
Our first vet was Hungarian; she, disparagingly, called them ‘A lady’s dog’, although their athletic frames are lithely fleshed with brisk muscle. They were originally carriage dogs, which back in Hungary, were typically purchased in pairs.
Our vet, Judith, who was an exceptionally glamorous woman, lived in Pimlico with several eastern cats, an amazing collection of antique Hungarian jewelry – which she once put on for us when we took her to the theatre – but which stopped happening as soon as we had children which irritated her, and whose premises are now The London Emergency Veterinary Centre.
Judith had her own emergencies. There was her exotic collection of chinchillas that too often fell off their perches at an unexpectedly loud sound, or intrusion and died of heart attacks, which is not uncommon in caged chinchillas. Then, she decided, mistakenly as it turned out, but tragically too late for any help, that she had a self diagnosed cancer. She didn’t tell anybody but gathered her two favourite cats into her arms, sat down at her desk and took a lethal overdose of morphine. All that happened long before Lucy’s time and when I was still young enough to be mortally shocked. Judith always did amaze me.
Our first Vizsla was called Ali and he travelled down from Scotland in a twined shopping basket with a label tied around his neck warning us that all Vizslas love to eat and roll into dead things which, despite their elegance, they do. Ali watched our son Alex arrive and grow up, suspiciously at first, but as soon as he learned that the highchair was also a food depository their devotions were complete. Ali’s much later and almost timely death was also Alex’s first experience of meaningful but unexpected loss, from which he has never entirely recovered. (To be honest, Ali was initially called Alexander as we thought he was going to be the nearest we ever got to having a son, so we had to create an alias after Alex managed to join us.)
When Lucy arrived at six weeks old, she was born into a prizewinning litter of ten who were weaned and separated from their mother at four weeks, we were determined that she would be a proper dog, unlike her predecessors, and sleep in the kitchen rather than inside of our bed. Alex and I both took work breaks and devoted three full time weeks to acclimatize her to kitchen life. To begin with either one of us slept downstairs to be close enough to her pen to reassure her that all would be well. Alex complained he was developing a post-natal depression due to sleeplessness and the high-octane level of her relentless attachment demands.
Our real troubles only began later when we moved on to the next stage of separation and left her alone for the night. Even the current doyenne of militant child regimes, that uncrowned successor to Truby King, Ms Jeanna Ford would have complimented our rigour.
Lucy did not: she didn’t scream for one night, or three. She screamed like a banshee, or an uprooted mandrake, for three weeks. Each morning, I would go down to her pen and find her covered in her own excrement; each morning I would, delirious with both exhaustion and joy, gather her into my arms and bathe her in our bath. One morning, I couldn’t bare it any longer and Lucy has slept deep in our bed ever since. Unlike any of our other dogs, she has never, ever, been left without the company of a human member of her family pack for more than four hours.
Vizslas have an unique habit which, in different contexts, can express their anxiety, joy or crisp reprimand: without warning, they leap up beside you and seize your wrist, which is then clamped by a soft but determined mouth. Heaven. Their other divine attributes are too numerous to list.
I have always held the idea that one joy of having dogs is that they, unlike us human animals, can, if painfully, be replaced. I am not sentimental about dogs and I envy the way they, unlike humans, are not dependent on parliament ratifying new laws that might, eventually, allow its electorate legally to decide when we have suffered enough.
So long as you have insurance – and your vet stays around –a dog will receive more prompt and concerned care than most humans. Vets, unlike most doctors, still know what whole bodies get up to and look like. Vets are, in emergency, even legally expected to step in and treat us humans: who are, after all, animals! Whereas, it has is recent years, become an offence for a non-specialist paediatric surgeon to operate on a child under sixteen!
Imagine.
We have a brilliant vet, Dr. Frank Seddon, who has one practice situated just off the Abbey Road, and thankfully close to home. (Only last week our gentle giant of a boxer sneaked a bar of Valrhona chocolate off the table and within minutes was at the vet having a hefty dose of emetic. Frank was dismissive of the idea that most dogs are allergic to chocolate but once there he wasn’t taking any risks. Nobody, in their right minds, take risks with boxers’ fragile digestions.)
Frank, at various times over the last sixteen or more, I have stopped counting, years, has operated on the guts, eyes, tumours, and mouths of our dogs. He could do the same for a reptile, or a rat. Veterinary, (what a word that is to spell), provision may be expensive but at least most vets still understand how the whole of their patients’ bodies interconnect. Which is in contrast to the super sciences of the biology of a human breast, where you now require one specialist for a nipple and another for a mamma.
Lucy is not a dog. She is my tutelary spirit and inspiration. After spending over forty years of my life in the company of dogs, I cannot ever, ever, imagine replacing her. Lucy is forever.
Lucy in Regents Park , London which is so beautiful it deserves it owns blog
Birthday at the Waterside Inn, Bray July 29, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Atomies of love.Tags: birthdays, Cygnets, food, Michelin three star restaurants, The Waterside Inn
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I am allergic to birthdays and particularly to my own. But, I perversely start feeling sorry for myself when nobody else seems to remember. I originally started blogging to accompany the highs and lows of writing of my book, but it seems to have turned out, if about anything, to be most consistently about friendship. By coincidence, today also happens to be the day that my agent – rather than consigning my proposal to her dustbin – has sent it out to various editors. The best birthday present might be that one of her selected editors turns out to be interested. I have in readiness now brought myself a digital recorder and organized several interviews for August, which is the quietest month of my year.
I have had a brilliant birthday day at Bray when one of our oldest friends took John, (hitherto referred to rather formally as ‘my husband’) and me to Alain Roux’s enchanting Waterside Inn. It is not just unique for its culinary arts and service but for its kindness, which word I shall return to. It was generous of our ‘joint’ friend, and we don’t have many ‘joints’, de Wynter not only to invite us but to drive us there, although the journey was characteristically scary as he challenged every set of traffic lights, man and beast in his path.
As we careered into a narrow country lane as if it was a runway, blown into disarray by the wind, it seemed unlikely that we were approaching one of only three Michelin three star restaurants in the UK. Rather, it seemed as if we were arriving at a chaotic wayside inn. Just for a minute, I thought it was an ambush as somebody leapt forward to park our car. I knew it was going to be good when everybody smiled – there were a lots of smiles because the restaurant seemed to have almost as many smiling waiters as diners – and everybody seemed to be genuinely smiling rather than grimacing, but it got even better when we were seated at a table that was almost floating on the landing stage of the river.
I don’t intend to go into much detail about the food which was simple but superlative: hours of care and preparation had been combined with sorrel and herbs from the “backyard”, whilst literally across the road, ‘Mandy grows roses for our sorbets and from the neighbouring county Mr Secker delivers our organic eggs” to provide the kind of result whose culinary brilliance is concealed in a godlike simplicity which I always dream of providing for a family feast. It’s one thing to gather the finest ingredients of any species but quite another not to ruin them. And, I adore eating roses and violets.
I have given up expecting to be served an entire roast duck in a restaurant since the White Tower in Charlotte Street ceased to be. I find those leaden wads of maigret of duck breast are a wonderful incentive to become a vegetarian for life. Today, we were served a whole roast duck from Challons intended for two but carved with such surgical deftness it could have fed four. I rarely eat meat but this excursion into flavour was worth every prick of conscience and my plate even had a consoling nursery flourish as it was flaked with pastry in the shape of a duck which – had it not been plumped out with the mystery of a consoling carrot puree - was so light that it would have taken flight from my plate. The cooking was playful, not pompous, witty and oh so kind.
Why wont this word ‘kind’ leave me alone? I think it’s because the restaurant somehow, no not somehow, but under the spell of Alain Roux, manages to create an unique aura of ‘the milk of loving kindness’ through his studied simplicity rather than any whiff of self congratulatory superiority. At a ‘consensus’ end to the lunching hour, Roux appeared from the kitchens and moved from one table to the next talking and chatting, even with much good nature agreeing to be photographed at several tables amongst a dining room full of satisfied customers and fulfilled staff. I half hoped he would pass us by, but he didn’t, and when he did, his modest warmth seemed to be as genuine as mine. In fact so genuine I found myself rather foolishly confiding that it was my birthday and was rewarded with a spontaneous hug and kiss.
As Roux said, produce and team spirit are everything.
Well, not everything because the highlight of my day was the bevy of cygnets who arrived Thames-side, escorted by their devoted parents. Seven grey cygnets assembled to nudge at my empty hands whilst they made cheeping sounds which, despite the fact that they must be four months old, no only two because the first cygnet born this year was on the 3rd of May, sounded as innocent as newborn kittens. Later, our waitress who had been at Bray for seven years, told us that the swan family does not pass by their mooring on any regular basis and that this yield was the first swan bevy in seven years to have survived their lurking predators. It seems that gourmet dining also goes on in the Thames where pikes pitch and pounce and foxes wait patient for dappled dusk.
She also told us that last year the swans nested on the traffic slipway when there were no survivors. And, how some days the family abandons the river and settle outside the back door of the inn. Today, they came to help me celebrate my birthday and what I shall remember for ever is this particular swan family and the human kindness – rather than grandness – of Alain Roux and his Bray-side team and their culinary genius of comfort.
Now, as I write the word ‘comfort’, I know why I have been involuntarily besieged by the odd phrase ‘milk of kindness’ and that is because the newborn’s first experience of kindness is in the comfort of nourishment. That is precisely what a meal at the Waterside Inn does, it nourishes our entirety. Well, it did mine and we can only ever speak for ourselves.
Thank you, Alain Roux.
From our table
Birthday bevy of cygnets
Becoming … less afraid of rejection July 20, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Atomies of love, Becoming....Tags: friendship, Patsy Rodenburg, rejection, Way with words festival
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Rejection is never nice but fearing or avoiding it can shrink life. About four years ago I decided that I was going to ask the universe – or its inhabitants – outright when I wanted something and that the worst that could happen to me in exchange was a rejection. I have done so, and what’s more I can’t think of any rejection that’s still smarting. Important to me, as I grow older, is that I carry on becoming rather than shrinking. Life’s not worth much to me if I’m not in a state of emotional becoming.
With regard to the topic of rejection, I must go back to the thorny question of lost friendship. The thorn in many lost bouquets is that once the friendship energy has passed it’s often impossible to get it back on track beyond an initial gossip catch up. One is lost for more thoughts and then silence descends. Times have changed; feelings too and returning to memories often turns out to be the best conclusion. But, there are exceptions.
When I agreed to have a dialogue about memory and mind with Hilary Mantel at Dartington’s festival A Way With Words, I noticed that one of the speakers scheduled on the same day happened to be a lost friend. Except, she was never lost in my mind. Yet we had lost track of each other, or maybe I got jealous that she seemed to have been over colonised by friends that had been introduced. Or, I felt rejected, or whatever. (Whenever I think of the dynamics of friendship, I always think of Hermia and Helena’s volatile argument about friendship) and how tricky it can be to turn two into three, whatever the gender.) The speaker was Patsy Rodenburg who is an international voice teacher. Except, Patsy is more than that as everybody in theatre from NY to LA and back to London knows. Patsy works with energy, breath and presence. Patsy works with the universe, Greek chorus and knows all Shakespeare’s best sonnets by heart whilst I have struggled to lock twelve into my poetry portmanteau.
My spontaneous response was to ring Patsy, whom I hadn’t seen for precisely six years and leave her a long and enthusiastic message asking if we might travel down to Dartington together. I never got a reply. I didn’t need to cringe, or want to bite into my lip because me husband did it all for me. He doesn’t like even a whiff of rejection, but then who does? It’s true that when I didn’t immediately hear back from Patsy I decided that she must be away, and that I’d hear soon enough, but I didn’t. With each day that came and went without any reply it felt like something was missing. By the time I caught the train for Dartington I was beginning to hurt enough to hope that our paths wouldn’t cross, and I could just pretend that she wasn’t there.
Ushered towards the dining room for lunch the first person, out of several hundred, to cross my path was Patsy. In an instant I knew there was still a present energy as well as a past memory and that which was lost had been found. After the event we drove back to London together: the journey took five hours but it passed in a whir of shared mythology of tales of birth, death and future life. Patsy doesn’t teach voice, she teaches life, and she doesn’t only inhabit the universe she consults it as her mentor. It is inside of her. We also discovered that we are both fascinated and excited by concepts and developments in neuroplasticity which might become the subject of my next blog. Unless I hear that my agent has sent out my book proposal in which case I might find myself writing still more about rejection.
Patsy Rodenburg PRESENCE published by Penguin
Rethinking Friendship July 10, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Atomies of love, Uncategorized.add a comment
I wrote earlier that sometimes it takes a lifetime to know which of those magic meetings in life with significant others remain with us as platinum rings of eternity. Now, I think I may have been placing too much emphasis on the idea of endurance. For a start, I don’t have as many friends now as when I was younger. I’m more reclusive, more disillusioned and whereas I used to love talking on the telephone for hours I now dread it ringing and would far rather communicate arrangements in staccato, via text.
Since I wrote about friendship I have found myself recurrently thinking about two or three very important relationships in my adult life with whom I have now lost touch. Although they have become past chapters of my life, they are not, at least in my mind, closed. In two instances – where the relationships ended abruptly – and in one case no matter what I did to make reparation, I was powerless to heal the misunderstanding. In the other case, I was not generous enough to try, and now it is too late. In fact that is why I no longer enjoy talking on the phone, it reminds me of our almost nightly conversations that often simmered on the professional gossip of the day: who was in and who was out, for hours.
There are those critical friendships where one shared life-stages with a significant other. When I was younger, in contrast to now, these people were always women and it then felt as though I had a husband, the man I was and am married to, and a ‘wife’. And, it was with my ‘wife’, or maybe we were two witches, that we sifted through the vegetation of our children’s lives: their thread worms, nits and fevers. Looking back, I cannot recall any time when I was happier than when I pushed my firstborn in her pram across Primrose Hill with my ‘wife’ and we were entranced not just by our babes’ beauty but also by our own, it was a marvel, yes a marvelous love feist of motherhood and friendship. We shone as brightly as two stars in our psychidelia and patchouli.
What I am trying to say is that even when relationships have died – and for whatever reason – their memories vividly mark a chapter of our lives. I still remember not only my own, but my children’s long lost best friends as if it was yesterday. It is not, after all, I think the length of time that matters but the depth of loving, or come to that, hating.
THRESHOLD MOMENTS OF ENGAGEMENT June 28, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Atomies of love, Uncategorized.Tags: beginnings, relationships
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I commented earlier on the frightful pangs – when one is writing – of beginnings, of empty pages and mental spaces, which provokes another thought which journeys in a different direction when I am thinking primarily as a psychotherapist and not as a writer. The beginnings of any significant relationship are not empty but often full of awe, excitement and usually a delusory sense of freedom.
On the assumption that some of us, and hopefully most psychotherapists, are using their lifetime to become more complete, beginnings are vital threshold moments of engagement. Whether they take place in the protected space of the consulting room, or in a more random way, they are, for me, like entering through those classical ‘gates of horn and ivory for dreams’ and then moving on towards ‘A fence of wild pear and oak’s dark heart’ where two strangers can meet who hope to become more entire. ‘So, to’intergraft our hands, as yet /Was all the means to make us one,’. (Donne.) If the chemistry is right that first meeting – whether professional or personal – can be the moment when once more everything feels possible. In those relationships which begin with an eureka moment of ‘I’ve found another missing bit of myself’, the ‘Other’s’ presence can allow us to feel as if an answer to an unsought question has floated into destiny.
There is always the risk that any instant illusion of engagement turns out to be as destructive as the shadow meetings with the irresistible and seductive Duessa in Spencer’s Fairie Queen. Hope of communion is ignited but sometimes its energy is gossamer fine. It may be days, months or probably years, even a lifetime, before we find out if the engagement of a new beginning has become the platinum of eternity.
